Robin Morrison: Photojournalist

NZ On Screen has a 20-minute chunk of this excellent 1981 documentary in which Robin Morrison talks about his work. It's well worth a look. Hat tip to Russell Brown for the link.

Hallucinating Tony Fomison

These pictures are also from Tunnel Beach. As I say, it's a magical place.

Tunnel Beach

I was at Tunnel Beach recently, and it really is an amazing place. It's just South of Dunedin city, seaward from the suburb of Green Island, and it costs nothig to visit. Try to visit when the tide is out, as you will be able to explore more of the beach. Reasonable fitness is required as the path is steep: you realise exactly how steep, on the way back :-)



There are fantastic cliffs:

The beach access is through a short tunnel carved in the limestone. The walls of the tunnel have a wonderful texture:

On the beach, there are more amazing cliffs:

Some of the eroding limestone cliffs take fantastical shapes:

New Zealand landscapes: Northland to Antarctica

There have been a lot of books published about the New Zealand landscape, but none are like this one! Grant Sheehan has assembled a stunning collection of fresh images and new angles on areas he obviously knows intimately. Sheehan's landscapes are not the sort you find on postcards; instead, he picks out rich colours and textures: lichen on a fence, crops in a field, layers in rock, reflections in water, clouds soaring in the sky. He captures the atmosphere of a place more than recording its landmarks.

Grant Sheehan's images are perfectly complemented by a CD of son Rhian Sheehan's ambient music, included with the book. Rhian Sheehan's spacious soundscapes recall Brian Eno in his Music for Airports period: they're lush but subtle, and they fit the New Zealand landscape so well.

You can order the book from the publisher, Phantom House, here.

I hope the book is a wild success for the Sheehans -- it deserves to be.

You can find out more on Rhian Sheehan's music here, and you can listen on his MySpace page.

And here's a video to be going on with:

Lenticular clouds

Summertime in Canterbury is a great time for lenticular clouds - those lens-shaped clouds that form downwind of a mountain range because of air turbulence. Lenticular clouds are beautiful and strange. I'd love to take as good a picture of them as this one by Wairarapa photographer Chris Picking!

Images copyright Grace Dalley, all rights reserved.

"the substance of things, their being, their thingyness"

Peter Peryer, Photographer

Peter Peryer has a new book of photographs out. I know this not because I have seen it but because Paul of The Fundy Post has written this wonderful review, which manages to convey what the book is like without showing any of the pictures, and also without any artspeak at all:

"Peter Peryer is a New Zealand photographer who photographs things. Here, for example is a sequence of photographs about a third of the way through the book:

26. Donkey, Legoland, 1997
27. Bulls, 2006
28. Punakaiki, 1997
29. Owl, 2003
30. Sand Shark, 1991

To explain, the donkey is life-size and made from Lego bricks. The bulls are of indeterminate size; they are six plastic toys. Punakaiki is represented by a rock formation of dense horizontal layers; again its size is indeterminate. The owl on the facing page appears to be real; the pattern of its feathers is similar to the rock formation. Although in nature there is a fish called a sand shark, this one is a shark made of sand, on a beach."

The review is playful and serious, like Peryer's photos. Read the whole thing here. And you can buy the book here.

Peter Peryer has a very cool blog (and photolog) here. It's very straightforward in style, and it's worth keeping an eye on because you never quite know what will show up next. For example, his recent posts feature pictures of: a tree, a church, a submarine, a quail, a gravestone, and a cloud.

Megan Lewis

Photographer Megan Lewis, originally from New Zealand, spent 5 years living with the Martu people in the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia.
Her amazing photographs are the subject of her book, Conversations with the Mob. You can read more about it here. And there are some sample images on this page.

Congratulations Edith Amituanai

Edith Amituanai is the inaugural winner of the Marti Friedlander Photographic Award. The award is biennial and gives the recipient $25,000 with which to further their career.

Amituanai's subjects are drawn from her family and community and the houses they live in.

Friedlander says:

"I have chosen Edith as the inaugural recipient of the Award as I believe she has an exceptional talent. I particularly like the way her photographic essays portray people and places that reveal New Zealanders and all their diversity. She is a most worthy recipient of an Award that is intended to support the development of the medium of photography."

You can read more about the Marti Friedlander Award, Amituanai, and Friedlander here.
There's a nice article from the Herald about Amituanai's work with Samoan rugby players in Europe here. And there are some more examples of her work here.

Bang!

This image by Michael Lidski is the most unusual photo of fireworks I've seen! His nature photos are also fantastic. What about this one?! Wow.

Andes - Flight of the Condor

This is an astonishing book: a tour-de-force of photography by NZ photographer Tui de Roy. Collected over 30 years, there is a huge variety of Andean imagery here, and every photograph is compelling. Every environment found in the Andes is here: cloud forest, volcanoes, high plateaux, salt lakes, jagged peaks, windswept coast and glaciers, complete with all the unique plants and animals which are found there. A treasure of a book.

Sense of place

I saw Picturing the Peninsula at the Christchurch City Gallery the other day, and it was fascinating. It's a collection of paintings, drawings and photographs of Canterbury's Banks Peninsula: you'd be amazed how diverse the images are. Standouts for me were paintings from Tony Fomison and Dean Venrooy, and a photograph from Mark Adams.

I looked online for more information on Dean Venrooy's amazing paintings, and this was about all I could find.

Victoria Ginn

Figure in the New Zealand Landscape isn't like any other landscape photography book I've ever seen! Vicotoria Ginn uses New Zealand locations in ways you won't have seen before. This is one of my favourites. And this. They're all fascinating, though.

Ginn shows dancers in staged tableaux of various kinds: some enact historical events or myths, some are visual jokes, some are evocative and enigmatic; each shot is a carefully-composed moment of stillness. Over them all is an air of drama and strangeness: the landscapes look both familiar and alien.

Ginn describes herself as an "Ethnographic Art Documentary Photographer". Her work certainly defies the usual categories! Her biography and a history of her practice is here.

Rakiura: the wilderness of Stewart Island

On the subject of landscape, Craig Potton Publishing has recently put out this sumptuous Rob Brown book on Rakiura/Stewart Island. Brown took the jewel-like photographs over many years while tramping Rakiura's back country: beaches and forests, mountains and tussocklands. The pictures are accompanied by a thoughtful text on Rakiura's history and his experiences there.

I was fascinated to read that all the photographs were made on medium-format transparency sheet film in a fully-mechanical camera, and with the use of a hand-held light meter. He certainly hasn't taken any easy options! He says what with the heavy sheet-film in his pack and all the lenses, it was sometimes a conflict between carrying enough food or enough film. He says it's less painful to be hungry than to run out of film. :-)

Photorealist to photographer

I always assumed Grahame Sydney painted his beautiful landscapes from photographs, but apparently he works from detailed sketches. He was unable to sketch in the Antarctic owing to the harsh conditions, and so he took photographs instead, which he is exhibiting at Christchurch's Salamander Gallery from the 20th of this month. The press release and some pictures are here.

I'm interested that he says he has not altered the photographs since taking them, and that he hopes they show his individual "eye". Many great photographers have shown their individual vision precisely by working on the images: Ansel Adams, with his famous Zone System, spent many hours adjusting tonal values in his pictures.

Adams is quoted as saying: "Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships" :-)

Colour of the Antarctic

I also note that Sydney's Antarctic photos, like Craig Potton's in his recent show, show the snow and ice as pale grey. For a camera to register detail in the lightest areas, it must be set to underexpose - to register bright white as a pale grey. This can be modified in the printing stage, by overexposing (or "pushing") to turn this palest grey back to white. Of course, the more the image is pushed to white, the more detail is lost. Potton and Sydney have both opted for truth-to-detail rather than trying to replicate the blinding whiteness that must be such a feature of being in the Antarctic.

Great New Zealand Books

One of my New Year's resolutions was to read more New Zealand books. Two gems I have come across are:

New Zealand: A Natural World Revealed by Tui de Roy and Mark Jones. Don't let the unmemorable title put you off, this is a sumptuous book, full of the sort of photographs that make you think the authors must have spent years, if not decades, amassing them. Particularly memorable are the sequences of kea, kakapo, and kiwi.

Spinning

Most photographers go to some trouble to keep their camera steady while taking a picture. Wellington artist Darren Glass goes to the other extreme: he's made a camera that fits on a frisbee, and takes the photo while spinning through the air. Art News has the full story